Mariquitas, ‘Marvellous Race Created by God’: The Judicial Prosecution of Homosexuality in Francoist Andalusia, 1955–70

Abstract

This article argues that the mariquita's subjectivity became a prevalent trope when individuals were prosecuted under charges of homosexuality in Franco's Spain. The mariquita was a liminal homosexual male who was expected to be family-oriented, devout, and involved in flamenco culture and Catholic festivals. I focus on judicial records to underscore the mariquita trope as a popular strategy for questioning the implementation of a stringent legal regime while demanding the social conformity of sexual minorities. The interventions of this article in the literature on nonconforming sexualities are twofold: (1) It contributes to the international scholarship by tracing the centrality of Catholicism and southern Spanish folk culture on mariquita subjectivity and social attitudes towards sexual minorities. This complicates the premise that liberalism has historically been the primary ideological frame informing sexual minorities’ resistance to repressive policies. In Spain, under a dictatorial regime, sexual minorities’ adaptative strategies and identities incorporated aspects of traditional rural femininity alongside modern forms of queer self-expression, such as drag shows in urban cabarets. (2) It contributes to the Spanish historiography, by revising the existing metrocentric research on homosexuality under Francoism and emphasizing the discrepancy between medico-legal discourses and recurring expressions of conditional toleration by rural communities.